Design Archives

Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain

Description

This book—and the exhibition it documented—questions the reproduction and dissemination of images of human suffering. The thumb on the cover acknowledges the viewer’s participation in this exchange. To frame these troubling images in the context of lengthy critical debates, we separated the book into two parts: essays, printed mostly in black and white on a creamy uncoated sheet, and plates, printed in full color on a coated sheet. A latent image, a black box in the shape of a film negative, marks the beginning of each text. The essay pages’ contrasting typographic texture makes the images easy to spot. The outer edges of the plate pages are the same color as the essay section, as if the words frame the photos. There are no captions on these pages, but the colored type at the bottom directs you to discussions of the image and to a section that includes extended captions.

Juror Notes

This book’s dichotomous typography and composition engage the reader in a conceptual game exploring the representations of beauty and pain.